Spring RTS Engine

Okay so I've been doing a lot of UI work with chili lately, and like most I've noticed the lack of certain documentation. Not to say it isn't there in sample's and comments; it can just be hard to find if at all. Though, after all is said and done I personally love it and think the community could benefit from more knowledge of what it is and what it can do.

I'm to the point where I think I can actually help with this. First off, I just want to get some input before trying to tackle any of it.

In no particular order some things I'd like to cover

-- Explain what each control generally looks like(with images and default skin) and some example use-cases; as well as explain the different properties and their effects.

-- Explain the skin system, or at least start off with a basic tutorial on creating/modifying a custom one.

-- Explain some functions and calls, e.g. Object:GetObjectByName(name)
and I guess basically how chili interfaces with the rest of your script/widget

-- Add random useful tidbits, e.g. prevent zooming while using the middle mouse over a certain window.

Let me know if there's anything I missed and any advice would be awesome

I also just want to note that chili is not Epic menu, integral menu, etc.. that you see in ZK, Evo and other games; those are widgets people wrote that use chili. Adding chili to a mod/game does nothing except allow you to run widgets that require the chili framework.


Future Disclaimer: I am still relatively new to spring, programming concepts, and open source in general so please forgive any incorrect terms/jargon or general ignorance

Yes please.

On the wiki currently there is only sunspots 3-part tutorial;

http://springrts.com/wiki/Chili

Documenting the API and creating a tutorial for each control is what you should start with imo.

Can you add luadocs to chili code, i.e. checkout official chili and add docs to stuff so it's more likely to remain up to date?

gajop wrote:Documenting the API and creating a tutorial for each control is what you should start with imo.

My opinion too as they are probably the least documented outside of the source code (edit: by outside I mean mentioned in the forum somewhere). I'll probably start with control's (especially new/unused ones). I think jk's chiliguidemo.lua covers how each control looks and functions visually but doesn't explain the why very much, so I'll probably work off that. Then I'll move on to some of the more useful bits of the API. After that it'll pretty much just be noting things down as I better learn them.

gajop wrote:Can you add luadocs to chili code, i.e. checkout official chili and add docs to stuff so it's more likely to remain up to date?

I'm assuming luadocs is for auto-generating docs from source? I'll look into it but I haven't had any experience in anything like that so it wouldn't be right away. Either way, I can't dispute that it would be the ideal way.